Can DirectX 12 performance be improved by software/drivers or is it hardware bound?

Schytheron

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Aug 9, 2012
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Title says it all.

I am asking because I kind of impulse bought a GIGABYTE GTX 1070 G1 Gaming online because it was REALLY cheap. My original plan was to wait for the RX 490/490x to release because I know that (for the moment, hopefully) AMD have the best DX 12 performance. I am worried that I <removed> up real bad because I plan on keeping my GTX 1070 for atleast 2 years and if the DX 12 performance isn't going to improve then NVIDIA buyers are gonna have a bad time considering that all games will have DX 12 in the near future (first time I am buying an Nvidia card).

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Solution


Where does an RX 480 match a GTX 1070 in any game built on a low level API? It doesn't, even in a best case scenario using DOOM with Vulkan as the API. We can write that scenario of an RX 480 matching a GTX 1070 out completely.

Take all of the current DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, and the RX 480 is still on average 2% slower than the GTX 1060 and ~5% slower on average iuf you factor in DirectX 11 and OpenGL games.

turbopixel

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"
Can DirectX 12 performance be improved by software/drivers or is it hardware bound?
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Software can always be improved... But we can't see the future.

About which games are you talking and what resolution? What is DirectX 12 performance??? This is depending on the game itself and the implementation by Nvidia. DirectX 12 itself is a standard, which will not change. And there is also Vulkan and OpenGL as DirectX alternative. Don't forget them.
 

anti-duck

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There is a chance that NVidia will improve their Hyper-Q software and preemption async though whatever they gain from doing so wouldn't be much as shader efficiency is already near maxed, but they will never be able to do true parallelism without context switching. The only way that NVidia will see the gains that AMD are seeing from low level API's is by chucking more cores at the problem, though I do think NVidia can still gain a few percent via drivers and other optimisations for low level API's.

You also need to consider why AMD gains so much in low level API's. It's because of the CPU overhead problem that has plagued GCN for ever; AMD gain much better shader efficiency with low level API's, but that CPU overhead is still there in the form of 'execution bubbles'. AMD made a big deal about being able to do true async (graphics and compute work in parallel), but AMD video cards take longer to move on to the next task than NVidia cards so execution time ends up being around the same.

At the end of the day, if a Polaris based RX 490 does come out and it can do 200fps in a DirectX 12 game where your GTX 1070 is doing 160fps, then do you really care?
 

Schytheron

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Of course I care. If RX 490 is doing 200 FPS, my GTX 1070 is doing 160 FPS and a RX 480 is also doing 160 FPS then I could might as well have not wasted my money and got a RX 480 instead.
 

anti-duck

Honorable


Where does an RX 480 match a GTX 1070 in any game built on a low level API? It doesn't, even in a best case scenario using DOOM with Vulkan as the API. We can write that scenario of an RX 480 matching a GTX 1070 out completely.

Take all of the current DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, and the RX 480 is still on average 2% slower than the GTX 1060 and ~5% slower on average iuf you factor in DirectX 11 and OpenGL games.
 
Solution
Don't sweat it mate, that 1070 you bought is a really solid card. The value proposition improves significantly for AMD on DX12 and Vulkan, but that doesn't all-of-a-sudden make the 1070 a bad card or a bad purchase.

I like to support AMD wherever I can, my last two GPU purchases were AMD. But right now, if you have the budget for a GTX 1070 and you want to start gaming now, not even the most ardent AMD fan could advise you spend your money on anything other than the 1070 and retain any shred of integrity... there is no competition at that price-point right now. (FWIW, I'm not saying the RX 480 is a bad card, it's not. It's just in a different product tier and price-point).

We have no official launch date for an RX 490 and we don't know how it'll perform. But you can bet that if it was launching soon and AMD were confident it could convincingly beat the performance and/or value of the 1070, we'd be seeing leaked benchmarks all over the place. That happens a lot when they want you to hold on to your money until their product is available. I haven't seen many rumours for the 490, and certainly nothing concrete around performance... so the prospect of AMD launching a 490 that trashes the 1070 in the near future is extremely unlikely.

You have a good card... enjoy it!